Month: June 2025

On a recent Sunday afternoon in lower Manhattan, a small shop inside the Oculus, a soaring curvilinear mall at the World Trade Center, stands out for the bustling crowd thronging its space. Advertisement “We’re out of stock,” more than one employee can be heard telling customers. This is not one of New York’s many top-brand boutiques but Pop Mart, a Chinese designer toy brand that has become a sensation in the United States. Its signature “blind box”, containing collectable figurines revealed only when the box is opened, runs for a…

Speculation that US President Donald Trump may visit Beijing in September has sparked “cautious optimism” among some Chinese analysts about a possible diplomatic breakthrough as trade ties between the rival powers teeter on the edge of a fragile truce. Advertisement A Kyodo report on Sunday citing unnamed sources said that China was planning to invite Trump to its Victory Parade in Tiananmen Square on September 3, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. When asked to comment on the report on Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman…

Catch up on some of SCMP’s biggest China stories of the day. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. History tells us US-China ties will survive current rupture: Neysun Mahboubi The leading academic finds grounds for “moderate optimism” after leading a group of American students on a 10-day tour of China. 2. China’s factory activity rebounds in June as US trade tensions ease Factory activity in China edged upwards in June but stayed in contractionary territory for a third straight month, as the…

Chinese tech giant Baidu on Monday marked its entry into the highly competitive field of Chinese open-source artificial intelligence (AI) systems, by making its flagship Ernie 4.5 models available for download on AI site Hugging Face. Advertisement Baidu open-sourced 10 variants from its Ernie 4.5 multimodal model family, from the 0.3 billion parameter lightweight models to the heavyweight 424 billion parameter ones, according to a statement. Beijing-based Baidu, one of the earliest tech firms in China to develop large language models (LLMs) following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022,…

Beijing has renewed its warning to other countries not to strike deals with the United States on terms that come at China’s expense – ahead of Washington’s looming deadline to conclude tariff negotiations with most of its trade partners. Advertisement Chinese officials are concerned that nations from Europe to Southeast Asia may enter into trade agreements with the US that divert supply chains, reduce bilateral trade with China or compel governments to exit Beijing-led projects, analysts said on Monday. “The first important one is not to shift the supply chain,”…

China’s Communist Party is preparing to set in regulatory stone the boundaries of various commissions and groups under its top decision-making Central Committee, with new rules clarifying their often nebulous responsibilities. Advertisement The rules were reviewed by the party’s top echelon, the 24-member Politburo, on Monday in a meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping, state news agency Xinhua reported. The report did not spell out the regulations but did say they were meant to standardise the policy coordination and review process at the top. The rules were also designed to…

Chinese chipmaker Sophgo has adapted its compute card to power DeepSeek’s reasoning model, underscoring growing efforts by local firms to develop home-grown artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and reduce dependence on foreign chips amid tightening US export controls. Advertisement Sophgo’s SC11 FP300 compute card successfully passed verification, showing stable and effective performance in executing the reasoning tasks of DeepSeek’s R1 model in tests conducted by the China Telecommunication Technology Labs (CTTL), the company said in a statement on Monday. A compute card is a compact module that integrates a processor, memory…